Is there a way to filter out null Any? values in Kotlin Map?

Question

I'm trying to think of a function that would allow a Map<String, Any?> object to be treated as Map<String,Any> through type inference through applying a single function.

I am pretty new to the transformation functions in Kotlin and have tried the various filter and filterValues filterNot on the map like so:

val input = mapOf(Pair("first",null))
val filtered: Map<String,Any> = input.filter { it.value!=null }

it also fails to compile with any of these

input.filterValues { it!=null }
input.filterNot { it.value==null }
input.filterNot { it.value is Nothing }

The closest I can seem to get is applying multiple steps or having an Unchecked cast warning. I would have thought that filtering the values to be !=null would suffice. My only other thought is that it's due to the generics?

Answer 1

The filter functions return a Map with the same generic types as the original map. To transform the type of the value, you need to map the values from Any? to Any, by doing a cast. The compiler can't know that the predicate you pass to filter() makes sure all the values of the filtered map are non-null, so it can't use type inference. So your best et is to use

val filtered: Map<String, Any> = map.filterValues { it != null }.mapValues { it -> it.value as Any }

or to define a function doing the filtering and the transformation in a single pass, and thus be able to use smart casts:

fun filterNotNullValues(map: Map<String, Any?>): Map<String, Any> {
    val result = LinkedHashMap<String, Any>()
    for ((key, value) in map) {
        if (value != null) result[key] = value
    }
    return result
}

Answer 2

The compiler just doesn't perform type analysis deep enough to infer that, for example, input.filterValues { it != null } filters out null values from the map and thus the resulting map should have a not-null value type. Basically there can be arbitrary predicate with arbitrary meaning in terms of types and nullability.

There is no special case function for filtering null values out of a map in the stdlib (like there is .filterIsInstance<T>() for iterables). Therefore your easiest solution is to apply an unchecked cast thus telling the compiler that you are sure about the type safety not being violated:

@Suppress("UNCHECKED_CAST")
fun <K, V> Map<K, V?>.filterNotNullValues() = filterValues { it != null } as Map<K, V>

See also: another question with a similar problem about is-check.